A tall Swedish girl with a Russian name, Natasha, was serving us — veal gratinée, fresh garden peas, cucumbers in a sour-cream sauce. When she had slipped out, I asked casually, “Is she the cook?”
“Yes. Cook, everything,” he said offhandedly, returning to the subject. “When London had two hundred and fifty thousand people, Venice had three hundred and fifty thousand. Shakespeare laid four of his plays there, The Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and Romeo and Juliet.”
He was throwing in Arden and Athens as locations, but I was only hesitant about one. “Romeo and Juliet?”
“Well, in Verona, but that’s nearby.”
I was captivated by him, the grand house, the Rolls-Royce in the covered driveway, the gardens. He seemed like Uncle Vanya to me, a shrewder Vanya, hardworking, knowledgeable.
I happened to mention d’Annunzio. He knew everything about him, his uncle had been in d’Annunzio’s squadron in the First World War and even looked like the poet, small, ugly, and bald. D’Annunzio had used him as a decoy. When he wanted to go to a hotel with some woman he would have the uncle sit in the villa, reading by the window.
We drank white Burgundy. The Swedish girl, graceful and silent, served a bowl of fresh raspberries and strawberries in cream. D’Annunzio, who died in the 1930s, had been the most celebrated writer of his time — the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth — with a life of colossal breadth, the most notorious since Byron’s. He was the lover of Duse and countless others. He had written Mussolini’s famous speeches. Becoming old, he withdrew into a pantheon of his own design, the Vittoriale, above Lake Garda, where a kind of opera continued. He dressed in a monk’s outfit and had his servants, all attractive women, dress as nuns. The next day he would be in a commodore’s uniform and they were sailors.
“There are at least twenty d’Annunzio scripts in Italy,” Edoardo said. “They’ve been trying for years to make a film about him. I remember the day he died. I was at school and a boy came up and said, ‘No school today!’
“ ‘No school?’
“ ‘The poet is dead.’
“ ‘Hooray,’ I said.”
It was like Rome in Edoardo’s house, Monte Mario, the terraces and pools. Sometimes in the evening, he said, they sat outside, he and the Swedish girl, looking out over the city. He was king of this Eden, gentle, wise, with a kind of classic ease and moderation, a single young novitiate beneath his wing — a man past the panicky appetites of youth, serene, able to savor, unhurried even if beset, like all men, by infinite desires.
“Edoardo?” said someone who knew him well when I mentioned his name. “He’s the most unhappy, dissatisfied man I know.”
“Impossible.”
“He’s an artist manqué. He thinks he’s wasted his talent on movies, which he detests. Actually, he’s never written any good movies — they’re all trash except for one he did for Germi. Oh, he’s a fabulous raconteur, especially in Italian, but he hates his life and is filled with self-disgust. He considers himself the only intelligent person in Italian cinema, and since he’s the only one who reads, he’s been able to make a career of taking de Maupassant stories and passing them off as his own. He’s never married. He’s the saddest man I know.”
—
This was the Coast, the fabled Coast. Girls with hair blowing and sunburned limbs. Driving there in the summer of 1976, coming out of the desert, the crushing heat and emptiness on the road to Barstow. Then tired and heat-stained, along the freeways, into Santa Monica and up along the sea.
The house had a garden looking towards the hills, hibiscus and jade trees and a single huge palm, the fronds of which one could touch from a balcony on the second floor. Visible from the same spot was the bare, alluring corner of a tennis court. Silence. Birds fluttering in the branches.
Of the mysteries, the first I recall was a lily stalk bending over in strange, jerky movements to disappear into the ground, A small animal was gathering supper.
Cool morning mist and the sound of waves, cries of children in the street, the fronds plunging down from the heights of the tree. Malibu. Dank sand beneath one’s feet in the narrow passageway that led to the beach, the vines overhead glittering with sun. A steamer basket arrived from my new agent, Evarts Ziegler; fruit and wine in a frock of apricot-colored cellophane. Welcome to California, the card read. It was signed simply, Ziggy.
Lorenzo, who was a favorite of his, had praised me and persuaded him to take me as a client. When I went to meet him he immediately told me how much he admired my work on a film I’d had nothing to do with. I nodded modestly, taking it as a good omen. He was, even then, an anachronism. His hair was gray; he wore three-piece suits and had gone to France for the first time in 1929 with his mother. Later he went back and forth across the country on the Super Chief, a train so luxurious it had a barbershop and waiters who would ask at dinner if you would like a nice fresh trout, caught in a mountain stream and picked up at the last stop.
In the bathroom adjoining his office were signed photographs of Sinclair Lewis and Hemingway, left to him by his father, and in the private sauna one of a naked girl ravenously drinking, water pouring down her chin.
He had a ravaged, sharp face which he was constantly working with his fingers, pushing it together, fixing it. He looked like a naval lieutenant who had been burned in a turret explosion. Over the decades he had acquired certain nervous gestures — I remember him habitually touching his right lower eyelid as he talked or thought. He was married to his second wife at the time, a blonde woman who seemed to hint society, but along the line he got divorced and after an interval married again. One had the feeling he was resigned to the idea of matrimony, that he regarded it as a necessity like good clothes. He was in his sixties though seeming to lack any mortal anxiety. “My health is innate,” he confided to me one day.
“Innate?”
I had misunderstood him. “But my marriage is a two,” he added.
He had a house in Pasadena, another in the desert, and a beach house near Santa Barbara. Business was conducted in his offices in Beverly Hills and occasionally over lunch, where he would discreetly point out various studio heads of enormous wealth. For me he performed the usual functions — negotiating, preparing contracts — but in many ways he was more of a companion than an agent. I could rely on him for unenthusiastic opinions delivered with the realism of a criminal-court judge.
I wrote during the day. At night as the sea disappeared, we drove, shooting past the canyons, along the coast. In the darkness the clouds were low over distant Santa Monica — beneath was a band of imprisoned light. Everywhere cars were speeding, not in urgency but in aimlessness, leisure. We drove in the redolent darkness, the undefined city drawing near.
California life, the film extra’s life, cool night air and sea winds from the 1930s or whatever decade one’s images of it dated back to. Despite my indifference, even dislike, there was something — the blue legend, the inexhaustible sea. On the cover of the telephone directory was a bit of description which explained that as late as the 1940s — the heart of my lifetime — such and such a part of the city had been almost all small ranches and now was entirely shops and homes. A melancholy came over me as I read it, almost sweet, a pang like thoughts of someone I had loved and would never see again. I envied those who had grown up here or had given it countless wasted days.